Arts & Culture

Former Jewcy Editor Jason Diamond Dishes on Being a Cupcake Bouncer

There’s a fun piece up on The Billfold by Jason Diamond (former Jewcy editor, holla!) about being a cupcake bouncer at Magnolia Bakery, New York City’s most overrated temple of confection. (For those of you too young to remember the craze, Magnolia Cupcakes were to the early 2000s as Dominique Ansel’s cronuts were to the summer of 2013.)

Basically, Diamond worked crowd control, ensuring that customers: a) were not being dicks, and/or b) absconding with more than the allotted daily limit of 12 cupcakes:

I was and still am, in fact, a bigger person. I have a beard, and thanks to my Eastern European ancestors, a fair amount of body hair. Put me next to a door in an apron, and people might understand that I’m 220 pounds of Jewish guy standing there to make you stop. But people didn’t always stop, so sometimes I’d have to literally stand in front of the door, using my body to block them from going in….

We hated the ones who waited in line, and when it was time to close, complained if they didn’t make it in—too bad for them, there was no sympathy. I don’t know what it’s like to work at Magnolia now, but back when it had a single owner whom we hardly ever saw, long before she sold it to a buyer that has been working with franchisees all over the world to open up Magnolias, if you bought a cupcake from Magnolia, there is a high probability that the person behind the counter hated your guts.